Health Beat

The previous two posts focused on getting a server up and running, and setting up your server with user access. In this post, we finally work on installing R and RStudio Server on our instance and configuring the application. Pay special attention to the packages notes at the end of this post. This will ensure a significantly decreased number of headaches. Let’s go! Continue reading…

The previous post focused on the initial task of instantiating a server. We chose Digital Ocean because it has an easy-to-use interface, great pricing, and great customer support. I should note that you can use any cloud service you’d like, so long as you can install Ubuntu 14.04 on it. If you do choose Digital Ocean, get $10 credit to your account by signing up with this link. In this post, we’ll focus on some basic steps to secure your server and ensure proper configuration. These steps are taken from Digital Ocean’s tutorial pages, though slightly modified to suit the use case. Let’s get started! Note that this tutorial focuses on mac users, which already have ssh console access through Terminal. Windows users can follow along, though you’ll need to install and configurePuTTY beforehand. Continue reading…

Although this post has been a very long time coming, I’ve gotten many good questions and requests over comment/email to create a streaming API tutorial, so here it is! This second post is a follow up to my initial Collecting Tweets Using R and the Twitter Search API post. As always, before I dig into the code, below are some notes I want to touch on.

How healthy is your community? Now you can find out! AskCHIS Neighborhood Edition is now live! Watch our launch webinar here. Here’s just a snippet of what you can do with this new app! Continue reading…

Sentiment Analysis and Natural Language Processing (NLP) have always fascinated me yet I never really understood the inner-workings of this type of analysis and never made the time to dig into the science. Until recently, I didn’t even know that you could collect tweets for free using Twitter’s Search and Streaming APIs. A few days and several blogs later, I’ve now set up R to work with both the Search and Streaming APIs. Since much of the information was located on disparate websites, I thought I’d give a general recap here. This first post deals with using the Twitter Search API and R to collect tweets. Before I dig into the code, there are some notes I want to touch on (which I later learned from Twitter’s documentation). Continue reading…